THE CENTRALITY of feminism to Sarah Kay's work is relatively uncommented on, partly because Kay's feminism is conceptualised and practised in lithe and complex ways that are always already intersectional (as we now say) with so much else. Her 1995 Political Fictions combines feminist critique with rethinking the genre of the chanson de geste and genre history: it disrupts the literary genealogy whereby women, courtly love, and twelfth-century modernity come to influence and ultimately to replace with romance the chanson de geste's epic gravitas and privileged access to an orally transmitted heroic masculine and historical past. Demonstrating that the majority of the chansons are contemporary with romances over the period from c.1160 to c.1240, Kay uses Fredric Jameson's (1981) notion of the political unconscious to argue for chanson de geste and romance as ‘political fictions’, both working with particular assumptions about what can and cannot be represented. Moreover, the genres relate to each other dialectically: the conflicts exposed by chansons de geste are repressed or disguised in romance, while romance similarly offers clues to the political unconscious of the chansons. It is not, Kay concludes, that the chansons de geste have undergone ‘romance influence’, but that their critics have. In fact, the modern ‘literary object’ (on which see Courtly Contradictions) derives from medieval romance, with its preferences for complex relations between words and things, single narratorial lines or foci, and ‘the individual’: what Kay terms ‘the poetics of the commodity’, in contrast to the chanson de geste's ‘poetics of the gift’.

It seems worth concentrating here on feminism(-plus) both for its key role in Political Fictions’ extensive rethinking of literary history and because of the continuing pertinence of Kay's account of women in the chansons de geste to where we are now. Arguing that romance representation of women as objects of erotic interest is not acceptable as the acme of women's aspiration, Kay dispenses with the teleological history that makes romance a progression from epic: ‘the forms that sexism and patriarchy take are redefined in every new political mentality’, making it impossible ‘to discount them by relegating them to the primitive past’.